ART

ART; Eccentric Roots, Humorous Touches

By VIVIEN RAYNOR

Published: August 27, 1989

JULIA HEALY comes well recommended by John Perreault, who, formerly director of Snug Harbor's Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, remains the eminence grise of the Staten Island scene. Indeed, in his introduction to the artist's show at the Museum of the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences, he frankly applauds her painting.

Ms. Healy lives in the borough, but her esthetic roots are in Chicago, a source of eccentric art since World War II - earlier if Ivan Albright's visions of rotting bodies are taken into consideration.

With eccentricity now the norm, however, exponents of it like Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson and Ellen Lanyon do not stand out as they once did. But there is no mistaking the weirdness in their art and that of many other painters, including Ms. Healy, who spent their formative years in and around the Art Institute of Chicago. Gahan Wilson, a Midwestern-born cartoonist who also specializes in the weird, has said that it is an inevitable reaction to the normality that prevails in the region as a whole.

As it happens, Ms. Healy has a sense of humor not unlike Mr. Wilson's, but she directs it at subjects that are ordinarily treated with the utmost gravity - pollution, nuclear disaster, oppression of women and the like.

And when it comes to images that are worth 1,000 words, it would be hard to find a pithier comment on the recent Alaskan oil spill than her painting of a blackened wolf floating upside down in some evil-looking green liquid.

This is a straightforward symbol, but some of the others leave room for additional interpretations. A chronic optimist could say of ''Polar Meltdown'' that climatic disaster had at least given each of the polar bears depicted its own personal ice floe to stand on. The same sensibility might even take comfort in noting that the houses in ''Burning Suburbia'' flame neatly, as suburban houses should.

In a four-panel screen, the artist stands up to be counted as a feminist by portraying a woman in a paint-stained apron handing out cookies to two children and not tripping over the fat cat that sits close by. Meanwhile, her mate, who is headless like everyone else in the picture, lurches out of the image, presumably on his way to work.

But by sardonically titling the work ''Portrait of Myself and a Few Million Other Women,'' Ms. Healy avoids accusations of exclusive self-pity. She does this again by contrasting ''Housewife Martyr,'' a female St. Sebastian riddled with real clothes pegs, with ''Businessman Martyr,'' a gray-suited figure pinned by real staples to a bank of files.

But the evenhandedness seems a shade calculated and the artist herself a bit too topical. ''In Her Shoes (For Lisa),'' the huge monochromatic portrait of Joel Steinberg seen from the standpoint of a child is not recognizable as such, any more than ''Portrait of You,'' a larger-than-life human silhouette in white, comes across as a comment on AIDS, despite the red splotches on the shape and the scrim curtain veiling it.

It is enough that today's horror reported by the media inevitably becomes tomorrow's made-for-television movie without artists getting into the act.

In any case, Ms. Healy is at her best when pondering the general surreality of life, for she is a spiritual relation of Magritte's, most notably in ''Never Needs Waxing.'' This is a drawing in a pastel-like medium of desert cactuses growing through a ''floor'' of tiles - the same as those lining the wall behind the female St. Sebastian.

Incidentally, the streaky surfaces of the tiles are echoed in the portrait of a man whose face, shirt and tie are all cut, as it were, from the same slab of marbled meat. The painting of a woman made entirely of fur might be regarded as his female counterpart.

Apparently, the artist finds the coats of animals equally engrossing, for she itemizes every hair with the finest possible brushstrokes. This somewhat mechanical approach makes her images eminently suitable for reproduction. And when the colors are fluorescently bright, as in the picture of a cerise ''radioactive'' bull terrier standing under an orange sky on pink and green grass, the impression is of a ready-made reproduction.

Though far from cuddly, Ms. Healy's animals - wolves, Dobermans, ''The Last Moose,'' who awaits the end with eyes closed, - are not as feral as those by Leonard Koscianski, nor does she share that painter's view of nature as an enemy. Nevertheless, the two have in common the bleakness that comes with stylization and obsessive brushwork.

The painter is obviously on a roll, and this may encourage her tendency to glibness. There are many images here that could all too easily be put to commercial use. But that does not make her peculiar mixture of menace and humor any less dramatic, particularly in ''Dog Eat Dog,'' where a stumpy Doberman chomps on the jaws of a bull terrier.

Titled ''Dispatches From the Front,'' this impressive display is on view through Sept. 10. The museum is at 75 Stuyvesant Place, off Richmond Terrace; it is open 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Tuesday through Saturday and 1 to 5 P.M. Sunday.